The Empty Birdcage

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  At an ancient site in Colombia, South America, worked originally by the Aztecs, abundant emerald deposits had been ‘rediscovered’ in the 1500s by the Spanish, only to lay fallow for hundreds of years, while Colombia endured political and financial crises. In March 1873 came a savior: a syndicate composed of Deutsche Bank, the primary partner; the precious metals conglomerate Jobine, Mathison; and a Colombian civil engineering firm which held the least significant piece of the pie, a paltry four percent. This triune had snatched up mineral rights for a price dramatically below actual value: a little under four million pounds.

  The entire endeavor carried with it the odor of political chicanery.

  Mycroft thought again of Prussia—or Germany, as Douglas would have it—with more land, more people, and four times Britain’s troops—not to mention a single-minded interest in procuring arms and military positioning. An emerald mine could certainly add to the necessary funds.

  Then there was Count Wolfgang, a rogue who had deep ties to Prussia… possibly at the expense of his own cousin and the country she ruled.

  Mycroft looked up just as his townhouse came into view. He considered redirecting the driver first to the Red Lion and then to Regent Tobaccos, to ferret out Douglas and to insist that he accept a proper passage home, but he discarded the notion as unworkable. For Douglas would not take kindly to that sort of coddling. He was not some poor unfortunate who could not care for himself, and for Mycroft to insinuate otherwise would be to insult him, something that he was not keen to do under the cloud of the present misunderstanding.

  Thus resigned, he stepped out of the carriage and was hastening towards his gate, with Carlton hoisting the umbrella beside him, when Zaharoff’s monogrammed carriage and pair turned the corner at speed and halted just behind the brougham. From the rig emerged a tall, distinguished-looking messenger underneath a gargantuan umbrella of his own, which bore the same ‘VZ’ monogram. The liveried messenger handed him an envelope, bowed his farewell, and hastened back to Zaharoff’s carriage, while Mycroft ducked inside his own so that he might open it in peace.

  Inside the envelope were two notes. The first, on monogrammed stationery, read:

  My dear Mr. Holmes,

  The method for extricating your subject consists of a personal entreaty. You shall find that the Chinese, being proud, will settle for nothing less. Your emissary must perforce be someone who is intimate with the subject and must bring with him proof of the subject’s innocence. I can furnish a letter that underscores that no one in my employ or tasked with serving as my emissary in any arms sales to Japan was of Chinese extraction. The original is on its way to Miss Ai Lin’s address at Stafford Terrace, so that she might pass it on to the appropriate envoy, with a copy of the same to your address in St. John’s Wood.

  As for this employee’s whereabouts on the date of the suspected treason—the 4th of April, the day of the purported sale in London—I can in no way vouch. There, you are on your own.

  As to the date of execution, my operatives tell me it shall take place at midnight on the 19th of June, one month from today. Time, therefore, is of the essence.

  In continued friendship and goodwill ~ ZZ

  A second note, on coarse, unmonogrammed paper, and in a different hand and pen, had upon it an address in the town of Zhouzhuang, in Jiangsu Province. This, and the fact that Zaharoff had been careful not to mention Bingwen Shi by name, seemed a strange but notable caution.

  Mycroft checked the date of disappearance again. It agreed with Cardwell’s information, and with Ai Lin’s: the 4th of April. Perhaps ‘Zed-Zed’ could not prove Bingwen Shi’s whereabouts on that day, but Ai Lin might, provided that she had kept Shi’s train ticket. For Shi could not be simultaneously in a sleeper car on its way to London and in London, selling arms to Japan!

  The thought of Bingwen Shi walking about Glasgow with Ai Lin flooded him with jealousy. Though he knew they would not be strolling hand in hand, nevertheless he pictured them thus; and it could easily have set him to sulking, wiping any other thought from his mind, were it not for a sharp rap upon the carriage door.

  On the other side of curtain and the breath-steamed glass stood his brother, gesticulating, seemingly unaware that rain was descending upon him in sheets.

  “I distinctly heard your carriage seven and a half minutes ago! What are you about in there?” Sherlock demanded.

  Carlton had once again abandoned his cloistered perch and was standing dutifully beside Sherlock, holding up the umbrella, which Sherlock was assiduously ignoring.

  Mycroft opened the carriage door, reconciling himself to hearing every tawdry detail of Sherlock’s travels and travails when instead his brother exclaimed:

  “There has been another murder! Huan and I must be allowed to proceed at once, while the body is fresh!”

  32

  THE FIRE FOUR ELEVEN KILLER HAD MURDERED HIS eleventh victim that very morning, in Kingston upon Thames. The newspapers reported that the victim’s name had been Rupert Jurgins, aged forty; that ‘the simple man’ had been found lying on his back across the threshold of his home; and that his elderly mother had been left ‘alone and inconsolable.’ The time of death was not reported, nor was news of who first found him, though Sherlock assumed that dubious honor had fallen to his elderly and inconsolable mother.

  Thankfully, as Jurgins’s abode lay little more than fifteen miles from London, Sherlock and Huan would be able to reach it by late afternoon, provided that they depart as soon as possible.

  “This is spectacular news,” Sherlock said. “The body is still under scrutiny; perhaps there is something I can do to gain admittance.”

  “On a case of this prominence,” Mycroft responded, “and so close to town, Scotland Yard will doubtless make an appearance. If their man, Martin Speckle, is present when you arrive, you may drop my name and hope for the best.”

  “Drop it? I shall wave it about like a flag!” Sherlock replied.

  After receiving his brother’s blessing, Sherlock paced the front hallway, waiting for Huan to come round with the carriage. He was all but despairing of it ever arriving when there it came, sporting a handmade canopy over the sprung seat. Upon closer examination, the canopy had been fashioned from canvas and oiled green silk, and then attached to the body with clips that one might use for sailing vessels.

  “What have you done?” Sherlock marveled to Huan.

  “I cannot have you sopping wet, Master Sherlock,” Huan explained. “And since she will not stop raining on us, the little beggar…”

  He wagged a finger at the sky.

  Mycroft emerged to see about the delay and frowned, displeased.

  “So, instead of resting a while, as you were commanded, you stood in the pouring rain, creating a canopy?” he huffed. “All because my brother does not have the wits God gave him to stay out of the rain?”

  Huan squinted at his handiwork, and then shrugged. “Let us hope it remains upright,” he said.

  “It shall withstand a hurricane!” Sherlock declared, which made Huan smile more broadly than ever.

  Sherlock tossed his traveling bag and vielle inside the carriage, though he had not yet found a moment to play it. Closing the door, he clambered up into the sprung seat, newly dry, and aiming to remain that way.

  It was not that Sherlock minded getting wet. In truth, it hardly fazed him. Still, if anyone had ever made such an effort on his behalf—one who was not family or obligated to him in some way—he could not recall when.

  Huan climbed beside him, took the reins, clicked his tongue, and they were off.

  * * *

  Mycroft, who had been dreading his own return home, watched as the carriage disappeared, with Sherlock waving a perfunctory goodbye. He waved back, suddenly feeling as light as a feather. Although he could not, in good conscience, thank heaven for some poor unfortunate’s demise, he was not above going back inside to smoke a cigar in peace, at long last, and to reconsider Parfitt’s notes in blessed solitude and cosseted b
y a nice, warm fire.

  He chose the drawing room, and an eye-pleasing Turkish rocker that he’d had reupholstered in soft black leather. He had a glass of scotch at his elbow—for when one had his heart set on an 1800 Napoleon, every other Cognac seems suddenly lacking—and had just taken his first puff of an El Rey del Mundo when an errant thought darkened his mind:

  I wonder what has become of Douglas…

  He shook it away, annoyed with himself:

  Really, Holmes, you are worse than a mother hen… until a second came fast upon its heels:

  I must go and speak to Ai Lin!

  Mycroft sighed and took a sip of his scotch. He had chosen twenty-year-old single malt Macallan specifically for its inoffensive smoothness and unfussy nature. Why, then, did it taste so harsh?

  Ai Lin can wait until morning, he told himself sternly. Yet, like a persistent gnat, the notion would not let him be.

  Since becoming friends with Douglas, he’d kept on hand—both in his library and in the drawer of the small writing desk in the drawing room—timetables for ships for London and Liverpool. It seemed that a steamer bound for Shanghai would be departing from Liverpool in two days’ time; and, but for a small and impractical sailing vessel departing three days after that, there would be no other steamer making the trek to Shanghai until June.

  There, that should settle it! he told himself. You must go at once and tell her!

  Instead, he sat again, immobilized by doubt. Could it be that he was delaying a visit solely to increase the odds of the Shi family finding no emissary? In that event, Bingwen Shi would not be reprieved and would therefore be executed.

  If that is your plan, it is absurd! Regardless if Shi is alive or dead, Ai Lin is not yours, nor can she ever be.

  No, something else was giving him pause, something he did not yet understand, a sort of foreboding. He took another angry swig of scotch to chase away both angels and demons, then a third and a fourth to inspire in himself some artificial bravery.

  Foreboding be damned! he thought at last.

  He stood a bit unsteadily upon his feet, put out his cigar, and called for the carriage, all the while fretting that the notion of visiting Jennings Rents in a rainstorm, just as the day was ending, would cause poor Carlton to hasten off at a gallop back to Buckingham Palace, never to return.

  As he waited for the carriage to come round, Mycroft stared at himself in the hallway mirror. He was glad to see that his pallor had abated; that his eyes looked clear; and that the scar upon his cheek had grown more faint with the years, unless he was simply becoming used to its presence. He ran a comb through his blond hair, wondering what Samson-like powers he thought he might lose if he submitted to a much-delayed cut, and with anxious fingers straightened his tie not once but thrice.

  You are not going courting, he reminded himself, but to help to recover her fiancé. Your appearance should be the last thing on your mind!

  He heard the carriage wheels outside the door, collected his hat and overcoat, and drew a deep breath. At least his heartbeat was steady. He took one last look in the mirror, feeling pity for the rather pathetic, yearning young man that he saw reflected there.

  33

  SHERLOCK GAZED DOWN AT THE SHAPE OF RUPERT Jurgins’s head. Victim eleven had large, slack lips, rounded eyes, and a heavy brow. Even death could not mask the fact that he had been of limited mental acumen, that he was indeed, as the newspapers had declared, ‘simple.’

  Who on earth would wish him dead? Who, but his suffering mother, would mourn him, or be punished by his absence?

  The police surgeon from London was indeed Martin Speckle, who had grudgingly granted Sherlock two minutes with the body—hardly a proper amount of time, but better than nothing.

  As he felt the back of Rupert Jurgins’s head and neck, he heard Speckle conversing with the parish officer, whose various jobs included rounding up witnesses and renting premises for viewing, for Kingston upon Thames had no police morgue.

  “In truth I was hoping this case would bypass me altogether,” Speckle fumed.

  “And what of me?” the officer declared. “You would think this takes precedence over all else, but no! Everyone still has his own little task to complete. The ribbons of bureaucracy one must cut through…”

  No splinters, Sherlock thought as his fingers palpated the back of Jurgins’s neck. Nothing here at all.

  “Do not speak to me about bureaucracy!” Speckle declared. After which the two men vied to top each other with the most egregious examples they could recall.

  Near Jurgens’s Adam’s apple, Sherlock spied a rather large nick, but there were others, from too many close but not terribly well-managed shaves over the years.

  Sherlock felt inside his ears and mouth. He picked up the dead man’s hands and inspected his fingernails. Though the bones had been twisted somewhat by rheumatism, Rupert was not a nail-biter, nor did he pick at his cuticles. Each nail was well cut and polished.

  “Finding nothing, am I right?” Speckle called over to Sherlock in a world-weary tone.

  * * *

  Rupert Jurgins had lived in Kingston upon Thames, in a handsome detached house whose neighbors resided at too great a distance to have been of any discernible use. Mrs. Jurgins, Rupert’s mother—despite her debilitating grief—had managed to do the utmost for her son. Black crepe ribbons adorned every window casing. An enormous garland upon a stand, arrayed with gigantic white chrysanthemums, was displayed to the side of the steps leading to the front door. And on either side of the entryway stood two funeral mutes, in black crepe from top hat to boot heel, and holding brooms encircled in same. As they were paid to do, they said nothing and stared at no one but served as silent witnesses that someone beloved had sloughed off his mortal coil.

  Within the residence, every mirror had been covered and every clock halted at 4:01 p.m., the moment that Rupert’s mother had come upon his body.

  Mrs. Jurgins was no more than sixty years of age, but sorrow had siphoned away all color and moisture from her flesh so that she seemed more like a needlepoint of veins and wrinkles. She was draped in black bombazine stretched over a wide-cage crinoline of the sort that had not been in fashion in thirty years. The cage made her already small waist look the size of a wasp’s.

  Though Huan had not been permitted entry—he was a mere carriage driver, after all, and a foreigner—Sherlock had bandied about his own prestigious post as Secretary to the Secretary of State for War, so that Mrs. Jurgins would be more amenable to answering a few questions.

  “I am aggrieved for your loss, madam,” he said with a slight bow.

  “Thank you, young man,” she replied, her voice constricted by sorrow.

  “My name is Mycroft Holmes,” he said, pitching his voice slightly lower so that he might sound older. “Secretary to the Secretary of State for War.” He pulled out one of the half-dozen old calling cards that he had thought to purloin from Mycroft’s desk drawer for just such an occasion. “This terrible man has claimed too many victims,” Sherlock said. “My employer, the Honorable Edward Cardwell, has taken a personal interest.”

  “Again I thank you, Mr. Holmes,” she said, placing the card into the reticule tied to her waist. “Perhaps when the others have departed, we might have a talk?”

  Sherlock bided his time until the guests were gone, at which point Mrs. Jurgins provided a bit of space for Huan in the kitchen, alongside the servants, for it had begun to rain again, while she and Sherlock sat in the parlor.

  “Rupert is not used to being alone,” she began. “Although I suppose he isn’t…”

  Her affection, and her agony for her son, were genuine.

  “Mrs. Jurgins, before you gave the killer’s note to the police, did you have a look at it?”

  She nodded.

  “How large was the note?”

  “About so large,” she said, her thumbs and index fingers joining to form a three-by-five square.

  “And do you recall the type of paper?”
/>   “Something coarse,” she said. “Unrefined. If I had to venture a guess, I would say hemp.”

  “And what of the dot over the ‘i’?”

  “In truth, it seemed more like a little line.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Oh yes. Before I married, I was a school mistress. I can tell a dot from a line.”

  “Had the paper been pierced through?”

  “I don’t know, I… cannot say, I am sorry.”

  “And Mrs. Jurgins, when you came upon Rupert, did you notice anything unusual? Foaming at the mouth, convulsions?” Sherlock asked.

  “No, nothing.” She began to cry softly.

  “There, there, Mrs. Jurgins,” Sherlock mumbled, realizing that his tone was perhaps a bit too atonal to be comforting. “I noticed he had rheumatism.”

  “Yes, since he was a child.”

  “And several nicks in his neck and jawline.”

  Mrs. Jurgins nodded. “His father had taught him to shave. He always insisted on doing it himself.”

  “His nails, on the other hand, were perfect,” Sherlock said.

  “That is because he permitted me to do them,” she replied, smiling. “He had his father’s hands.”

  Sherlock followed Mrs. Jurgins’s gaze to the portrait of a stern-looking older man above the hearth, his fingers clasped together over his belly.

  “How long has Mr. Jurgins been deceased?” he asked.

  “He died in an accident, Mr. Holmes. He was the supervisor of a colliery that exploded back in December 1866, killing 384 men and boys. The Oaks Explosion, perhaps you have heard of it?”

  “I am sorry to say that I have not.”

  “Well, you were young then. Younger, I mean to say.”

  “Yes. Forgive me if this sounds impertinent, Mrs. Jurgins, but how have you managed to preserve your lifestyle these seven years since your husband passed?”